Perplexity is planning to go public in 2028 regardless of how the market receives the listings of Anthropic and OpenAI, CEO Aravind Srinivas told CNBC. 

“Agnostic of these two companies, we were planning for something in 2028 so that still remains the case,” Srinivas said in an interview that aired on Tuesday.  

Srinivas has previously said the company has no plans to go public before 2028. His latest comments suggest a more concrete timeline. 

The CEO’s comments come after Claude developer Anthropic confidentially filed for an initial public offering last week. While there are no details on share pricing, Anthropic was last valued at nearly $1 trillion. OpenAI on Monday also confidentially filed for an IPO.  

These listings, along with SpaceX this week, are going to be among the biggest in history and a test of investors’ appetite for these mega-IPOs.  

“I certainly think there will be ripple effects if they don’t go well, like there is no sugar coating on that. The SpaceX IPO this week will definitely be a leading indicator to how Anthropic or OpenAI will go out,” Srinivas told CNBC. 

“I think it’s important for the AI industry that these IPOs go well, and I actually think they will go well, because they’re doing well.” 

The valuations of both Anthropic and OpenAI, known as frontier labs because their models are among the leading in the world, are under scrutiny from investors. 

Srinivas said that both companies deserve their high valuations because “they are on the frontier.” A slowdown in the pace of innovation may dent their valuations, he said, adding that there is no sign of this happening now.  

“If for six months you don’t see a model capability advance from one of these two companies, then it’s a problem for them,” Srinivas said.  

Roughly 15% of TotalEnergies’ production is offline, as the war with Iran nears the one-month mark, but surging oil prices have more than made up for the lost barrels, chairman and CEO Patrick Pouyanné told CNBC in an exclusive interview.

With Brent crude trading solidly above $100 a barrel, much of the attention has focused on oil prices, but Pouyanné said the crisis is having a much larger impact on product prices.

“The Brent market is ok, but the products market, which is the one which impacts customers … is much higher than Brent,” he told CNBC at S&P Global’s CERAWeek energy conference in Houston. He added, the world has “never experienced” refining margins from products including Asian jet fuel at current levels. In addition to petroleum products, about 30% of global fertilizer moves through the Strait of Hormuz, jeopardizing the spring planting season.

TotalEnergies is a major player in the global LNG market, including the largest exporter of U.S. LNG. The CEO said the company can still fulfill customer orders in Europe and Asia thanks to its diversified global portfolio. 

Last week, QatarEnergy said its Ras Laffan plant suffered “extensive damage” following Iranian drone attacks, effectively taking 20% of global LNG supply offline. The shutdown has sent natural gas prices in Europe and Asia surging.

Pouyanné expects prices could move substantially higher if the war drags on through the summer, since Asian demand rises over the summer just as Europe looks to refill storage. European natural gas traded around $18 per million British thermal units Tuesday, but Pouyanné said prices could hit $40/MMBtu over the summer if the conflict continues.

TotalEnergies is a major investor in U.S. energy. On Monday, it struck a deal with the Trump administration to abandon its offshore wind projects in return for $1 billion. The company agreed to reinvest the money into U.S. oil and gas projects instead.

The federal government is key for offshore wind permitting, and the current administration has been a vocal critic of the industry. Pouyanné said he did not want to litigate with the administration over its offshore wind leases – acquired under former President Joe Biden – and so approached the administration with a deal. He added that in the U.S. offshore wind no longer makes sense given cheaper alternatives.

“In the specific situation of the U.S., where you have a lot of land, you have a lot of gas, you have a lot of coal, you have a lot of land to build onshore solar, onshore wind, batteries, we don’t need to have offshore wind,” he said. “It’s a marginal technology, which is not affordable.”

“I prefer to allocate my capital to technologies which are more efficient, which give affordable electricity to customers,” he said.

As part of its expanding U.S. portfolio, TotalEnergies recently inked a 15-year agreement with Google to supply renewable power for data centers. Pouyanné said other hyperscalers – including Amazon and Microsoft – are now speaking to TotalEnergies directly. 

“These hyperscalers have understood that an energy company – like TotalEnergies –  because we have also capacity, not only to build, to invest, to have land, to trade, we were quite a good partner for them,” he said.

OpenAI is focusing employee and investor attention on its enterprise business as the artificial intelligence startup gears up to go public, potentially by the end of the year, CNBC has learned.

Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, held an all-hands meeting with staffers last week and said the company is committed to helping businesses, and is “orienting aggressively” towards high-productivity use cases.

OpenAI kickstarted the generative AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, and the chatbot now supports more than 900 million weekly active users. But the company is still racing to grab market share, particularly in the enterprise, away from rivals like Google and Anthropic, which is also weighing an IPO.

“Our opportunity now is to take those 900 million users and turn them into high-compute users,” Simo said, according to a partial transcript of the meeting reviewed by CNBC. “We’ll do that by transforming ChatGPT into a productivity tool.”

The Wall Street Journal was first to report the all-hands meeting.

OpenAI’s IPO could land as soon as the fourth quarter of this year, according to a person familiar with the matter. The exact timing is still subject to change, said the person, who asked not to be named because the details are confidential.

CFO Sarah Friar is building out OpenAI’s finance team ahead of a market debut, hiring Ajmere Dale, the former chief accounting officer at Block, and Cynthia Gaylor, the former CFO of DocuSign, earlier this year. Gaylor will oversee investor relations as part of her role, according to a LinkedIn post.

In December, OpenAI declared a “code red” effort to improve ChatGPT in the face of increasingly stiff competition from Google and Anthropic. The company temporarily pulled back on other investments in areas like health, shopping and advertising.

Simo said during the March all-hands meeting that OpenAI is moving with the same amount of urgency that it did in December, but noted that the company can’t declare everything an emergency.

“What really matters for us right now is staying focused and executing extremely well,” Simo said.

OpenAI has also been working to outline clearer spending targets after rattling markets with ambitious infrastructure commitments in late 2025.

Instead of the $1.4 trillion figure that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had been touting, the company told investors in February that it’s targeting roughly $600 billion in total compute spend by 2030, CNBC previously reported.

OpenAI is projecting that its total revenue for 2030 will be more than $280 billion, with nearly equal contributions from its consumer and enterprise businesses. The $600 billion figure the company is offering is meant to more directly tie to its expected revenue growth.

WATCH: OpenAI renews focus on enterprise in all-hands meeting amid IPO push

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees in an all-hands meeting on Tuesday that the company doesn’t “get to make operational decisions” regarding how its artificial intelligence technology is used by the Department of Defense.

“So maybe you think the Iran strike was good and the Venezuela invasion was bad,” Altman said Tuesday, according to a partial transcript of the meeting reviewed by CNBC. “You don’t get to weigh in on that.”

The meeting occurred four days after OpenAI announced its DOD arrangement, which landed just hours before the U.S. and Israel began carrying out strikes against Iran.

Altman told employees that the Pentagon respects OpenAI’s technical expertise, wants input about where its models are a good fit and will allow the company to build the safety stack it deems appropriate, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the meeting was private.

But Altman said the agency has also made it clear that operational decisions rest with Secretary Pete Hegseth. Altman has been vocally criticized, including by some OpenAI employees, since announcing the deal with the Pentagon shortly after rival Anthropic was blacklisted and labeled a “Supply-Chain Risk to National Security.” President Donald Trump also directed every federal agency in the U.S. to “immediately cease” all use of Anthropic’s technology.

Anthropic’s AI was reportedly used in the Iran strikes over the weekend as well as for the capturing of ousted Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in January.

Altman has defended OpenAI’s contract in various social media posts, though he conceded that it looked “looked opportunistic and sloppy” and that the company “shouldn’t have rushed to get this out on Friday.” He said in a post on X that day that the Pentagon “displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome.”

Anthropic was the first lab to deploy its models across the DOD’s classified network, and had been trying to negotiate the ongoing terms of its contract before talks collapsed. The company wanted assurance that its models would not be used for fully autonomous weapons or mass surveillance of Americans, while the DOD wanted Anthropic to agree to let the military deploy the models across all lawful use cases.

Last year, OpenAI was awarded a $200 million contract by the Pentagon, which allowed the agency to begin using the startup’s models in nonclassified use cases. The new arrangement will allow the company to deploy its models across the department’s classified networks.

Elon Musk’s xAI has also agreed to deploy its models across classified use cases.

“I believe we will hopefully have the best models that will encourage the government to be willing to work with us, even if our safety stack annoys them,” Altman said Tuesday. “But there will be at least one other actor, which I assume will be xAI, which effectively will say ‘We’ll do whatever you want.'”

Altman and Musk, two of the co-founders of OpenAI, are engaged in a heated legal battle that’s slated to go to trial next month.

XAI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

— CNBC’s Kate Rooney contributed to this report.

WATCH: OpenAI could profit handsomely from Pentagon deal, says Big Technology’s Alex Kantrowitz